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Ambrose, David

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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(1943-    ) UK author and screenwriter, with more than twenty film credits before the turn of the century, including the script for Amityville 3-D (1983). He also scripted the television Alternative 3 (1977) and directed one film for television, Comeback (1987), a borderline medical thriller whose focus on abnormal Psychology prefigures much of his fiction. The Man Who Turned Into Himself (1993), his first novel, uses a Parallel World structure to explore the deep trauma experienced by a man whose wife has just been killed in a fatal accident which his son survives; conquering his trauma, and finding his way home from the other dimension in which he has been trapped – where the wife lives but the son was never born – constitute in a sense the same journey. Mother of God (1995) is a Near Future thriller whose Scientist protagonist, having created an AI programme, is haunted online by the serial killer who has in a sense possessed it; Hollywood Lies (coll 1996) contains some sf stories; The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk (2000), paralleling the Bourne sequence of quasi-cybernetic movie thrillers, features a seemingly amnesiac para-military indomitable fighting machine (see Amnesia; Bionics), though the tale is in this case complicated by the fact that another female scientist's Invention of a memory-transplanting process may have, in Monk's case, been dangerously misapplied. The deep-structural implications of the twin story in horror are given an sf turn in Coincidence (2001) when the followed twin, who had not guessed the existence of his evil double, turns out to be a Computer programme, a parasitic iteration of the dark real. Ambrose's fiction comes close to Technothriller clichés and tends to reiterate a basic chase dynamic between its human and created protagonists; but usually manages to sustain genuine interest through its psychological twists and turns. [JC]

David Ambrose

born Chorley, Lancashire: 21 February 1943 [16 February 1943 has also been given]

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